Antivirus companies are today all warning of the latest email threat - a variant of the Sober worm.
Labelled as either variant 'I' or 'J' the worm has been spreading rapidly since first thing this morning. MessageLabs intercepted its first copy of the worm at 06:01(GMT). The worm appears in an email which so far has been seen in English and German language versions, according to Trend Micro.
Despite a growing number of IM-borne menaces such as viruses and unsolicited messages, businesses must not be put off rolling out the technology across the organisation, because the pros far outweigh the cons, says an IM gateway provider.
Using the names of famous people is a resource used by many computer virus writers to spread their creations
Just a few hours ago, PandaLabs detected the mass-mailing of an email message with the subject "Latest News about Arafat!!!", which actually contains a computer worm Phrases like "Osama Bin Ladin was found hanged" or suggestive file names like "JENNIFERLOPEZ_NAKED.JPG.vbs" are real examples of attempts to use social engineering techniques to spread computer viruses.
Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University in England, is looking forward to becoming a cyborg again.
But the academic, who has wired his nervous system up to a computer and put an RFID chip in his arm, is also warning that the day will come when computer viruses can infect humans as well as PCs.
Speaking this week at Consult Hyperion's fifth Digital Identity Forum in London, Warwick spoke of a future when those who aren't cyborgs will be considered the odd ones.
The latest version of the Mydoom virus suggests to security experts that a much-anticipated "zero day" attack may have already arrived.
"Zero day" refers to an exploit, either a worm or a virus, that arrives on the heels of, or even before, the public announcement of a vulnerability in a computer system. This week's version of Mydoom appeared only two days after a security flaw in Windows Internet Explorer was made public by two hackers, according to reports.
Security experts say they have discovered a Trojan horse that records e-banking user details and web surfing habits.
Antivirus company Sophos is warning that the Banker-AJ Trojan is targeting online customers of banks such as Abbey, Barclays, Egg, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Nationwide and NatWest.
The company said that once installed, the Trojan waits for users to visit their online banking websites, captures passwords and takes screenshots of the session. The information is then relayed to the hackers behind the ploy, who use the data to steal money.
The creators of the latest MyDoom variant, which exploits a recently discovered iFrame vulnerability in Internet Explorer, may have timed the release of the viruses to throw Microsoft's monthly patch cycle into disarray, security experts say.
A new family of worms which uses an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer is spreading widely across the net.
An ingenious new Trojan is circulating that hijacks PCs and uses them to send SMS-based spam to mobile phones. After a PC has been infected, the Delf-HA Trojan contacts a Web site for details on which spam campaign to run and then randomly generates a series of Russian mobile numbers beginning with the prefix +7921 or +7911. It uses the "send e-mail" function of a number of Russian mobile network Web sites to actually deliver the mail sent from the infected machines.
A new version of MyDoom uses an unpatched flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer to spread, antivirus companies warned on Monday.
The recently discovered vulnerability in the browser software allows the offshoot to infect a PC after a user clicks on a link, according to advisories from security software makers Symantec and McAfee. The program sneaks past antivirus applications that detect malicious software by scanning e-mail messages with attached programs.
